After the First Death

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “They were the only two things I had that somebody might want to take away from me. My job and my wife. What do you know about Gwen s new husband?”

  “Absolutely nothing. She met him in California, that’s all I know.”

  “Oh?”

  “She went out after you were sent to prison. Sublet the apartment for the remainder of the lease period, sold everything except a few things she put in storage, then took a plane to the coast. Awhile after that Kay got a note from her. We exchange Christmas cards. That’s about all She hasn’t been back since then, as far as I know.”

  I lit a cigarette. “Suppose she knew him before.”

  “It doesn’t seem likely.”

  “Nothing seems likely. What’s his name?”

  “I don’t know. Kay would know—”

  “Is she home?”

  “Sleeping. She went to sleep about an hour ago.” He looked down at his pajamas and robe. His feet were bare. “I was reading, just about ready to turn in myself.”

  “Sorry to bother you.”

  “Don’t be silly.” His eyes met mine. “I think you could use a drink. What can I get you?”

  “Nothing for me.”

  “Well, I can use one, then.”

  He found a bottle of Scotch and carried it into the kitchen. I followed him. He filled a tall glass with ice cubes, added a jigger of Scotch, then filled the glass the rest of the way with tap water. He asked me if I was sure I didn’t want to join him.

  “Maybe some coffee,” I said.

  “Instant all right?”

  “Sure.”

  We waited while the coffee boiled. We sat at the kitchen table, he nursing a drink, me working on the coffee.

  I said, “The name.”

  “I don’t remember it, Alex.”

  “Wake Kay.”

  “I can’t do that”

  “Why the hell not? Christ, Doug, I don’t have an abundance of time. I can’t afford to wait until things are convenient for people. The time’s too short as it is.”

  “I can’t wake her.”

  “Why?”

  “She’ll panic. She’ll want me to call the police. She thinks—”

  “That I’m a killer?”

  He shrugged, drank, nodded. “You know women.”

  “The hell I do.”

  “Well I don’t know what to do. You really think this guy—”

  “I don’t think anything, but it’s a place to start.”

  “You figure he and Gwen—”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He got to his feet “No. Not a chance.”

  “She wouldn’t have to have known what he did. She could have thought it was all straight, that I really killed Evangeline Grant.”

  “But you figure she was having an affair with him.”

  “That’s how it would read, yes.”

  He shook his head. “Not Gwen,” he said.

  “You sound sure of yourself.”

  “Dammit, I am! She loved you—”

  “And I loved her. But it didn’t keep me out of Evangeline Grant’s bed, or too many other beds before that. People are unusual animals. They don’t always do things for the right reasons. They don’t always do things that make a vast amount of sense.” I lit a cigarette. “I need that name, Doug.”

  “Kay has an address book. I’m not sure where she keeps it, but I could dig it up.”

  “Do that.”

  He sighed, set his glass down empty. “All right,” he said. “Wait here.”

  I waited while he went off to hunt for the name and address of my wife’s current husband. I waited, smoking my cigarette, drinking my coffee, listening very intently. At first I didn’t realize what it was that I was listening for. Then all at once I did. I was waiting for the sound of him making a telephone call to the police. The sound never happened, and he came back with a red leather book in his hand, and I wondered when if ever I would be able to start trusting people again.

  “This is it,” he said.

  The entry, carefully inscribed in Kay MacEwans’s small neat hand, read:

  Mr. & Mrs. Russell J. Stone (Gwen Venn)

  4315 Portland Hill Drive

  Los Angeles, California

  “She didn’t take down the zip code,” Doug said idiotically.

  “I don’t think I’ll need it.”

  “Are you going out there?”

  “God, no. Too dangerous. And not worthwhile, yet.” I copied down name and address on a scrap of paper, tucked it away in a pocket. “Mr. Russell J. Stone sounds very possible,” I said. “But there are other possibilities.”

  “Like who?”

  “Like an old boyfriend of hers whom I don’t think you know. Like a departmental colleague of mine whom, come to think of it, you do know. Whatever happened to Warren Hayden?”

  “Hayden? You must be kidding.”

  “I haven’t done any kidding in almost five years, Doug.”

  “Well, why in hell would Warren Hayden—”

  “Cam Welles got put out to pasture, didn’t he?”

  “Oh, sure, Just a couple of months after you, uh—”

  “You can say went to jail, you know. I know. I went There’s no point in pretending it didn’t happen.”

  “Just a few months after you went to jail, Cam Welles retired.”

  “And Warren got the top spot?”

  “Who else was there?”

  “My point,” I said.

  He stared incredulously at me. “Do you mean to suggest,” he said, “that for the sake of a department chairmanship, a meek little man like Warren Hayden would take a knife and—”

  “Why not?”

  “Alex—”

  “God damn it,” I said, “at least it’s a reason, isn’t it? Everybody on earth is very goddamn willing to believe that I killed two girls for the sheer hell of it, with no reason at all. At least I’m talking about motives, I’m advancing some possibilities.” I lit another cigarette. “There was an old lag I knew, a trusty in for life. A murderer. You know why he was in there?”

  “No.”

  “He was playing cards with his best friend and he lost. And when he thought about it afterwards he decided that the friend must have cheated him, and that really got him mad. He waited two days and thought it out all very carefully, and then he went downtown and bought a shotgun, and then he went to the friend’s place and emptied both barrels in the friend’s face. Took most of his head off.”

  “I don’t see—”

  “You didn’t let me finish. You know how much he lost in that card game? You know the staggering sum that made him.

  kill?

  “Alex—”

  “Fifteen cents, Doug.” I closed my eyes for a moment The human race is so imperfect an invention. “Fifteen cents. The chairmanship of the history department is worth a hell of a lot more than that.”

  “I don’t think Warren Hayden would do anything like that.”

  “Neither do I. But I’ll want to make sure.”

  “I don’t even think he’s in town this year. I think he’s on sabbatical somewhere in South America. Peru, I think.”

  “I’ll have to check. There are quite a few things I’ll have to check, Doug. It’s my life, you know.”

  “Sure.”

  I got up, pushed back my chair. We were uncomfortable with each other, Doug and I. I had gotten what I had come for, and we would each of us be glad to say goodbye.

  “I’ll go now,” I told him. Thanks for the coffee, and the conversation. And Russell Stone.”

  “Don’t go off half-cocked.”

  “I won’t”

  “Even if Gwen was having an affair, and I don’t believe it for a moment it doesn’t prove anything. Not by itself.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “So just take it easy.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He walked me to the door. I’ve still got some money set aside for you. Want it?”

/>   I said I did. I still had some money, but I felt I couldn’t have too much. There was little enough time, and I did not want to get hung up with money worries. He came back with two hundred dollars in tens and twenties.

  “You’ll get this back,” I said.

  “I expect to.”

  He didn’t expect to. He was good enough to say so. He was my only friend in the world, and he didn’t really believe me, and I didn’t entirely trust him. It can be rather a lonely place, this world.

  “Where can I get in touch with you?”

  “No place. I’ve been sleeping in alleyways.”

  “Is that safe?”

  “No. I’ll find a hotel now. Maybe across the river in Jersey, I don’t know. I won’t be staying in any one place very long, I don’t suppose. Safer to keep moving.”

  “Suppose something comes up?”

  “Put a notice in the Times. The personal column. One of the standard ones. My wife having left my bed and board, I will no longer be responsible for her debts. There’s half a dozen of those every morning, nobody ever reads them, so it’ll be subtle enough. And if I see it, I’ll call you.”

  “I wouldn’t want to use my own name. Kay would be furious—”

  “Oh, Christ, of course not. Make up a name. Oh, Peter Porter, how’s that? My wife Petunia having left my bed and board—that’ll do it.”

  “Peter Porter and his wife Petunia.”

  “Perfect. Easy for both of us to remember.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  We very awkwardly shook hands. He opened the door for me and waited with me for the elevator. It came, and we shook hands again, a little less awkwardly, and he went back to his apartment while I rode down to the lobby.

  Peter Porter and his wife Petunia. Simpler to tell him the hotel where I was staying. But I still didn’t trust him, or anyone else.

  10

  ON THE SUBWAY RIDE BACK DOWNTOWN I TRIED TO THINK OF something clever to do with what was left of the night. Nothing suggested itself. The night gave me far greater freedom of movement, but one could neither drop in on people nor telephone them at that hour, so that I was left with the freedom to go anywhere and no place to go.

  So I went back to my hotel and made more lists. Russell J. Stone. There had to be a way to find out something about him, but how? I would sleep on it. Warren Hayden—he did look out of the picture, it appearing highly unlikely that he would fly in from Peru, cut little Robin’s throat, and then resume his search for the lost city of the Incas, or whatever men sought in the Peruvian wilderness. His actual presence in Peru would need confirmation, and I would find a way to check it out but meanwhile he looked safe.

  Pete Landis. He remained on the list with nothing I had learned to confirm him or clear him as the killer. Doug didn’t know him, so there had been no point in bringing up his name.

  Don Fischer. I saw his name on the list from before and couldn’t imagine what it was doing there. I had bought an insurance policy from him. What did that have to do with murder? I closed my eyes and saw a pleasant-faced young man with thick glasses and thick eyebrows that had grown together to form one continuous ridge of brow. Gwen’s lover? My enemy? Inconceivable on both counts.

  I solemnly crossed off Don Fischer’s name. And began to laugh, because the only suspect—if such a term were advised in my investigations—the only suspect thus far eliminated was a man of whom I had not consciously thought at all since first writing down his name.

  Penn’s progress. At this happy rate, I could spend all my days writing down the names of strangers and all my nights crossing them off again, knitting a Penelope’s shawl of suspicion rather than the more purposeful tapestry of Madame DeFarge.

  I put my lists away. They bored me. I turned on the television set, and watched several movies which differed each from the other by the number of times the word late appeared in their general titles. In the middle of one of these I turned off the set and got out of my clothes and went to bed.

  “Mrs. Stone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good morning, Mrs. Stone. I’m Curt Amory of Industrial Research Corp. I’ve a few questions in regard to a survey we’re preparing, and if you’ll give me a minute or two of your time I’ll be able to send you a free gift for your troubles. Could you tell me, for a starter, approximately how many hours a week you and your family watch television?”

  “Oh, well, we watch about an hour a night, I suppose, but then I watch now and then in the day time—”

  I didn’t much listen. I asked a few more routine questions, a handkerchief stretched over the mouthpiece of the telephone—I had read that this changes one’s voice, though I honestly don’t know why it should.

  Then, “Now some statistics, Mrs. Stone. How large is your family?”

  “Three of us. Myself, my husband, and our son.”

  I hadn’t known about the child.

  “Are you native Californians?”

  “No. I moved here about four years ago.”

  “And Mr. Stone?”

  “Moved here ten years ago from Chicago.”

  “And his occupation?”

  “He’s purchasing director for Interpublic Chemical.”

  I went on, picking up a few more facts to help me trace Russell Stone. As the interview progressed there was more and more space before Gwen’s answers, as if she wondered why Industrial Research Corp. was interested in such a mixed bag of trivia. Then the operator cut. in to announce that my three minutes were up, and at that point my once-wife tipped.

  “Who is this?”

  “Thanks very much for your cooperation,” I said smoothly, “and you’ll be receiving your free gift in the mail, Mrs. Stone—”

  “Alex? Is that you? Alex, what’s going on?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Who is this? Alex? I don’t—”

  I replaced the receiver and left the booth.

  In an irrational way, I was pleased that Gwen had at last recognized my voice. After all, I had been married to the woman for quite some time. And even then, while we were married, I had occasionally found myself thinking of her as rather like those huge new glass and steel apartment buildings. One could live in one of those apartments for fifty years, and the day one finally moved out the apartment would shake itself utterly free of every trace of one’s occupancy; it would be as though one had never been there at all.

  So it often seemed with Gwen. I was sure I had made no impression upon her, that in the process of divorcing me she went through the rooms and corridors of her mind, wiping away any traces I might have left therein, tidying up carefully and readying the rooms for the next occupant. I found it startling, for example, that Russell Stone had been able to gift her with a child; if ever a woman were constitutionally designed to be barren, that woman was Gwen.

  Perhaps they had adopted the child. I found myself wanting to believe as much.

  I stopped at a Cobb’s Corner and had a cup of coffee at the counter. The telephone conversation played again through my mind and I smiled at the inanity of it. A survey indeed. Market research has had an extraordinary effect upon the American public. The average citizen is so well accustomed to answering any number of idiot questions about himself that he has become quite incapable of telling strangers to mind their own damned business. Virtually anyone will reveal virtually anything about himself once he is convinced that the questions are purposeless, designed only to facilitate the waste of corporate time and money.

  Would Gwen mention the call to Stone? I thought it over and decided that she probably would not. I couldn’t believe she had any knowledge of the frame, and thus would not know that he had to be protected—assuming, that is, that he was guilty. Thus what she would have to say, in effect, was something like this: I had a long distance call today, I think it was from Alex, but he pretended to be a market research surveyor and I told him any number of things about us before I guessed that it was him.

  Gwen has never enjoyed looking like a fo
ol. Few people do. She would forget the conversation, or convince herself that it was not me after all, or some such. She would not mention it to Stone, and he would not know that I was measuring him for an electric chair. Good.

  The New York Public Library showed me Russell J. Stone’s face. There is a magazine, I discovered, called Purchasing World, a trade journal which is evidently of some interest to purchasing agents. According to my once-wife, Stone had been promoted to his present position a bit over three years ago, so I went through a stack of issues of that vintage looking for the story that would inevitably accompany such a promotion.

  Patient plodding is the cornerstone of historical research. I made my boring way through the stack of issues until I finally found the article. They had given him most of a column, and there was a good head-and-shoulders shot of him, lips smiling bravely, eyes frank and open, hair neatly combed and parted. He looked like a large man, a beef and bourbon type, a little older than me, a good bit wealthier than me, a far sight more successful than me in almost every respect. Gwen, I thought, had stepped up nicely, had made a good exchange.

  I read the article. There was a boring lot on what his new duties would include, and what his old duties had included, and then there was the biography of our hero, the college he went to, the fraternity, the honors, the first jobs, all the grand and glorious steps he had climbed en route to the pinnacle of success he presently occupied, purchasing director for Interpublic Chemical.

  He was an Indianan, a Purdue graduate. He worked first in Pittsburgh, then for a long stretch in Chicago, and finally in California. And, almost completely hidden in the list of jobs, there was the information that he had been on special assignment for his Chicago employers for the better part of a year, the very year Evangeline Grant was murdered and Alexander Penn saddled with her murder.

  Special assignment in their New York office.

  I ripped that page out of Purchasing World, feeling as I did so that few persons beside myself were likely to have any great interest in that particular story. I, on the other hand, would want to refer to it from time to time. I had found my man. Now I would have to hang it on him. I wanted to know everything that page could teach me about him. I wanted to stare long and hard at that sleek successful face, and I wanted to coax and prod my memory until I could know where I might have seen that face before.